


i swear you'll see the dawn again

by flightofwonder



Category: Papillon (2018)
Genre: (everyone. everyone knew.), Affection, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Behavior, Dissociation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Solitary Confinement, Suicidal Thoughts, Touch-Starved, because i believe in self care thanks, sadly there is no kissing in this one but they are husbands don't you worry, solitary confinement fucks you up real bad, who knew, yes this is an au where they both escaped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-14 05:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17502206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofwonder/pseuds/flightofwonder
Summary: “Then, if you have to leave, I’ll be here when you get back. I’ll always wait for you. Always.”





	i swear you'll see the dawn again

**Author's Note:**

> This is not historically accurate whatsoever, so I apologize beforehand for that. But lbh none of us watched this for the history.

Papillon was a man who could be accused of many things. He was not guilty of what he was condemned for, no. But he was not blameless.

Once, with only four walls to keep him company and time nothing but a never-ending torture, Papi would count his true sins. He did so less often now. But every once in a while, standing alone with different four walls, he faced himself in the mirror, and counted again.

He was once a thief, and a burglar of thieves. He was no thief now. He had made an oath to live a different kind of life, though to whom that oath was made, even now he didn’t know. Maybe to God, maybe to himself; maybe to the man he spoke those exact words aloud to a lifetime ago. Regardless, he kept it, and now he earned his income honestly, if not irregularly, through construction work in town, and through his small plot of land. _Their_ land. It wasn’t grand enough to be considered a proper farm, but it was bigger than a garden, and they even managed to acquire some livestock.

Vaguely, he remembered Nanette once asking him for a house in the county. The idea was so ludicrous to him at the time, so clearly below him. Now, Papillon couldn’t imagine wanting for anything more.

He was once a liar, and a liar he was still. This he couldn’t help, not if he didn’t want to be shipped back to Devil’s Island. It was a necessary evil, a tool to help carve out just a patch of freedom on foreign soil. He kept his past close to his chest, and what he let slip in fragments was a carefully constructed tale of French sailors who had been lost at sea. But no one who knew him in town particularly cared about his past, and Papi told himself he made up for the false foundation with sincerity in his affections towards his acquaintances, those familiar faces he saw at the start of every day and sometimes shared a smoke and a beer with in the evenings. They were good people, and Papillon reveled in being in a society again. A society that trusted without reservation. He had taken advantage of that trust once, but he was determined not to do so again.

So, yes: Papillon was still a liar, but that was a sin he could make peace with. At least, this is what he told himself when doubt crept in. Because honestly wasn’t worth the cost of what he had to lose.

And, yes, he was once a vain man. This was probably the lesser of his faults, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think that his good looks didn’t play a part in his early career’s success. Pretty boys could charm their way into the seeder joints in town to make connections and get work. And being fit was a necessarily part of the job, sure, but he took pride in it nonetheless.

Now, as he looked back at himself in an antiquated mirror, he saw more a stranger than himself.  He had no way of knowing that he looked like after five years of solitary, but he could guess that he must look less gaunt now than he did when he stepped foot on the island. But still, he was a sorry sight. The angles on his cheeks were sharp, and his frame was what he once might have considered thin, if he had gone his life without ever experiencing true hunger. His eyes were the same blue shade, but they were overpowered by the sunken circles around them, looking as if he had never known a peaceful night in his life. The only evidence of familiarity was inked onto his collarbone in a delicate shape of a butterfly; if not for this brand peeking from the collar of his shirt, Papillon could have been any of the doomed men discarded by society and left to rot in incarceration.

There wasn’t much else he could do about most of what he saw in that mirror. His body was as healthy as it was ever going to be after enduring emancipation for almost a decade. Of course, this didn’t stop his companion from pushing platters of meat and vegetables towards Papi at every opportunity. Louis was a smart man, and he knew this could only help so much. But it was something he could do for him, so he did it. They didn’t need to talk about why.

That was how it went for most things between them. When Louis looked over monthly expenses, he never brought up how much more they could save if they didn’t keep a lamp turned on in their room throughout the night. When Papi accidentally jostled Louis awake, when his eyes shot open and he reached under his pillow for a shiv that wasn’t there, when Papillon had to hold him in his arms until his breathing finally evened out and he stopped trying to shake out of his skin, he never brought it up the morning after, always let Louis decide if this was going to be a day they talk about it. These were the unspoken compromises. Nothing could ease the dark fog of those years on an unforgivable terrain, but they could help one another endure it.

Once, after a violently restless night, they surrendered the idea that they would be getting any sleep, so they went and sat together on their porch, watching the countryside slowly color with the first strands of daybreak. It was then, in that period of time right before the world knew wakefulness, that Papillon finally confessed that, sometimes, he felt… far away. When the fog overtook him, every inch of him felt distant and cold, like he didn’t fit properly in his own skin. 

And he told him that it frightened him when he left himself. Admitting that fact was almost impossible. After everything they had been through, he couldn’t completely erase the minuscule doubt that Louis would decide he wasn’t worth all of this trouble and leave him. That a madman wasn’t worth keeping, much less one so weak. He wouldn’t have blamed Dega if he had left.

But Louis’ reply was so simple in the face of that impregnable darkness.

“Then, if you have to leave, I’ll be here when you get back. I’ll always wait for you. Always.”

The cup of tea in one hand was warm, but Dega’s hand in the other was warmer.

There was nothing about that fog they couldn’t talk about, but there were few things that they felt the need to. So now, when faced with an urge so ridiculous but utterly unwavering, Papillon wasn’t sure how to proceed.

The face of the stranger in the mirror couldn’t be changed, at least not much. But he _could_ change the overgrown locks of hair that hung in front of his face. Grey was already littered among the gold, but apart from that, it was unchanged from what was on his head a lifetime ago. It was such a simple thing to fix: just a few cuts in the right place, and maybe he would learn to stop flinching at his own reflection, in time.

 If only the prospect didn’t freeze him to the spot like a hunted animal.

And therein lied the problem.

"I didn't know you were coming home early."

Papillon must have been lost in  his reverie for longer than he thought, because when he broke eye contact with his reflection in the mirror, Dega was standing in the doorway.

His tone wasn’t without an edge of accusation. He didn't do well with surprises. Living alone on a prison island for five years required constant awareness and defense, and even though they were long gone from those stone walls, they pushed on the edges of Dega’s mind still. Once Louis explained this to him -- after a mishap that involved almost getting stabbed by a kitchen knife --  Papi understood, in that way where he knew he would never completely understand. Papillon had to spend all those years in silence, him in vigilance; they both had to do very different things to survive.

As such, Papi usually would have made his presence known in some subtle way long before Louis had made it to the bedroom door, because he was right: the sun was still high in the sky, and he should not have been home for hours yet.

"I'm sorry," Papillon said, moving to stand from where he had been previously leaning on the dresser table.

"It's alright,” Louis replied, making it clear that the matter was already dropped. Things tended to get easily forgiven between them nowadays.

Louis moved with his accustomed limping gate over to their bed. One paint-stained hand moved to the loose bun at the back of his head, and then dark, thick strands fell down onto his tanned neck and shoulders, like waves onto the shore. His hair had grown exponentially since they had escaped, though it was certainly cleaner and better kept. It was definitely too long for proper society. But unlike Papillon, Louis wanted almost nothing to do with society anymore.

He never went in to town except to help the local businesses manage their accounts. _An attempt to balance the scales_ , he had said, with that thin, wry look on his face that could almost pass for a grin. Papillon could never make out for certain if his friend lost his taste for human company in the brutality of prison life, or if the stupid man was determined to live in some self-imposed exile as some act of atonement. He suspected it was a mixture of both.

When he wasn’t assisting the honest workers in town, he painted. Almost constantly. They had a room towards the south of the house that became his makeshift studio, where he spent most of his days staining his fingertips on canvass after canvass. What happened to each painting once completed was up to Louis, and therefor was anybody’s guess. Some became fixtures in their home, though it didn't escape Papillon's notice that the tamer and more pleasant scenes were the ones that ended up on their walls. They also made an arrangement with a local gallery downtown, and every so often, a notice came in that one of his pieces had been sold.

And every once in a while, Papillon would wake in the dead of night to the sound of a crackling fire just outside their bedroom window. He had learned to stop reaching over to find an empty spot next to him when this happened. When Louis came back in the room, still smelling of smoke, he would simply change and then crawl into bed next to him, as if this were a perfectly ordinary occurrence. This was one thing that Louis never spoke of, and Papillon never asked.

Sometimes, you had to make your ghosts real in order to destroy them.

“I wanted to see how Chuppi was fairing,” Papillon explained. Even though he grew up in the countryside, this was their first litter of piglets, and as such he found himself unusually fascinated with all their well-being, including the significantly smaller babe of the litter.

Louis, of course, had reared many during his time on Devil’s Island, and was much less sentimental about the whole thing. “You shouldn’t name it,” Dega said, not looking up as he buttoned down his ratty work shirt that was already layered with pigments in all shades. “It won’t survive the winter.”

“What can I say, I have a soft spot for runts.”

Louis let out something of a hum of sarcastic amusement, a sound now as pleasantly familiar to Papillon as any musical record had ever been, but even with his head ducked, he could tell by the rise of his cheeks that his lover had a genuine smile on his face.

And seeing Louis smile, a true smile without any hint of self-deprecation or deflection -- that was something precious. All this time, and just the sight of it was still enough for Papi will himself out of whatever pit of despair he had stumbled into that day. It was something real; it was something worth living for.

Papillon had spent half a decade willing himself to remember every detail on that face, every little expression, every line and crease and sunspot. It became a routine, making mental inventory of that man. He'd recount the color of the flecks in his eyes, what side of his face that healed scar was on, no detail too small to recall.

A worry was always in the corner of his mind, creeping at the edge of his vision, that if he didn't keep this routine, he would either die in his cell, or be lost completely when he finally left it.

And he could have died. He never understood before, how a human spirit could just surrender to the dark, but he understood now. Thinking back on those darkest of nights still left Papillon with cold sweats. Not because of how he felt, but how he didn’t. All he had to do was close his eyes, and he could just... go.

_"It's a good escape."_

That wasn't Dega, but the face that temptation wore was awfully convincing.

And somehow, unimaginable as it might have seemed, the few precious contacts he made with other human beings only threatened to lure him closer to the abyss. They were flesh and blood, but they might as well have been specters, silent and unfeeling witnesses to his misery. Some of the other inmates would beg for them to say something, say anything, as they went to their work of cutting their hair, but they never did. Humanity, right at your fingertips, but it might as well have been an ocean away.

The prisoners who came to sheer his hair were never unnecessarily cruel, but that only made it all the more worse. Every time they would come, hands of all sizes tugging at his hair and cutting at his beard as passionlessly as a gardener would a hedge. They didn't care any more than the guards did, and it was an unrelenting reminder of what he was in the eyes of everyone there. Inhuman. A voiceless mouth. An empty carcass that would be meat for the sharks tomorrow, or a year from now, or a decade, and not a single soul would notice or count or _care_ –

Except one.

_“You came back.”_

"Papillon?"

He hadn't noticed he was shaking so hard, hadn’t even noticed that he had left at all. But he must have left, by the way Louis was looking at him now.

Slowly, carefully, Louis reached out towards his head, where apparently he had a white-knuckled grip on a cluster of his own hair, and _when had that started_ – but Louis oh-so gently pulled his hand free.

"Papi."

The motion of Louis' thumb rubbing against the palm of his hand never failed to calm him, even though tears still threatened to spill from his eyes. He had to will himself not to use his free hand to take up the task that Dega had interrupted, which was evidently trying to pull his hair out of his scalp, and instead closed it into a fist.

Not there. Not alone.

But still, he shook.

Louis was patient, a weight as he sat by his side on their bed, real and alive. It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun was high in the sky, and his work was untroubled, but here he was, crying like a child over the prospect of getting his hair cut. Absurd, infantile, useless.

"Breathe. I'm here. I'm right here."

So he focused on breathing and nothing else, until he no longer felt like his heart was threatening to pound out of his chest. He still didn't look at the man next to him. This shame was pointless, he knew deep down, since they had seen each other through much worse and never held judgement in the past. Even so, Papillon had to take a deep breath before asking.

"If I ask for a favor, you promise not to laugh?"

"I never do." And that was true. They could mock their demons at times, but not the shadows they cast over them.

"Could - God this is so fucking foolish, but... could you cut my hair?” The nails in his fist were beginning to cut into the spots on his skin that have been scarred over many times by now. “I don't want... strangers touching it. Not yet."

If Louis was curious, he kept it to himself. Later, after it was done and away, maybe then Papi would explain. But for now, Louis didn't push. Instead, a small, sly smile appeared on that sun-spotted face.

"So you've grown jealous of my impeccable style, is that it?"

"Yeah," Papi laughed, coarse and dry, but his tone lighter, "that's it."

“Well, then, there’s no time like the present,” he said, and before Papillon could muster up the energy to object, he was being pulled to his feet. For half a breath, as their hands clasped one another, he was caught in the mimicry of when he did the same for Dega years ago, when the only one Papillon could trust to keep Dega moving, keep him upright and safe, was himself and his own two hands. Now, all his strength betrayed him, the physique he had been working to regain useless in the face of his terror. This time, it was Louis helping him to stand. There was no one else he could trust with this. Only Louis.

Balancing the razor-sharp edge of “here” and “gone” was still precarious in moments like these. One moment he was being led by the hand, and the next he was sitting in Louis’ studio. The room was designated as such because it got the most light during the day, though Louis had offered for it to be their bedroom instead for the same reason. Beams of light shone through the glass planes and onto the hardwood floor, where they danced over colored dots. In the saturated glow of midday, with the wind whipping the shapes outside rhythmically back and forth, up and down, they could almost look like spatters of blood on the bow of a boat, lost at sea.

There was suddenly a low groaning sound, wood scraping against wood as Louis pulled one of his mirrors over to the open window where Papillon sat. He turned his head away from it quickly, instinctively, as if a sheet of glass was the worst thing his eyes had seen. He felt a familiar pressure on his shoulder.

“You need to tell me if I’m fucking it up, alright?” A kinder version of a harsh truth. _You need to look_.

A shaky inhale, then a nod, and then he straightened his head towards his reflection once again. He didn’t catch his own eyes in the mirror, instead gravitating immediately to the blue-grey ones behind ancient but repaired spectacles. Today the gleam from those eyes was muted, but other times they were radiant, speckled with gold and as bright-blue as the sea. Vibrant, ever-changing, unpredictable. Sometimes as distant as a moor in the ocean, sometimes with penetrating focus, and sometimes as hard as stone. The tenderness they were capable of holding, though; that was for Papillon alone.

He could write a book on the subject of Louis Dega. And yet, he flinched when Louis raised his hand. Subtle to anyone else, but not to Louis.

A pause. Papi broke eye contact, afraid to see the pity or the shame in the other man’s expression. But before he had the chance to apologize or call this off, he felt thin, calloused fingers slowly slide across his scalp.

A part of him had been waiting for the world to collapse at his feet, and he hadn’t realized it until this moment. Back there, these moments of human contact brought him no more comfort than a mirage would to a man dying of thirst _. Look at me_ , he wanted to scream, _tell me I’m still human, tell me I’m still alive_. All he was granted were unfeeling tugs at his roots and strangers avoiding his gaze. All he could do for days afterwards was trace the sharp lines on his face and feel the texture of his chopped hair, over and over again, so he could begin to convince himself he was real again.

But Louis never touched without feeling anymore, never touched anyone or anything without love or curiosity or hate. Maybe it was the artist that was always in him. Or maybe his touch and his heart weren’t so intimately tied before Papillon knew him; it was hard to imagine a forger being successful without a high level of apathy for the human condition. Regardless, the man he was before wasn’t the one standing behind him now. And that man’s touch was so deliberately kind, it was almost difficult to stand.

His fingers moved slowly, precisely, with pressure too light to be considered massaging, but as his finger pads trailed from his scalp down to the top of his neck without even a hint of nail biting the skin, Papillon could feel his shoulders unlock and his breathing start to slow.

He hadn’t noticed that Louis had started talking. His tone was easy and conversational, not careful or gentle, like Papillon was as breakable as he felt he was. This, at least, was familiar. This was what happened when the words were trapped in his throat, imprisoned by panic, and he looked to Louis to save him from the silence. Just easy conversation, as if it wasn’t one-sided.

Maybe Louis had the right idea by discarding society. Perhaps neither of them could achieve normalcy again. But together, in this small patch of the world they built, they weren’t extremities. They fit. Like lock and key.

 _No, that’s not it_ , he thought. _Like hearth and home._

Louis was methodical as he trimmed, glancing down at his canvass and back to the mirror as quick as a flash. But when Papillon dared himself to seek out the other man’s gaze again, those grey-blue eyes, those eyes he would know anywhere, locked instantly with his own. He saw everything Papillon was and was not, and he did not look away. And the heavy weight in the middle of his chest unfolded like wings.

“So,” he said, finally joining in on the conversation. “How do _you_ feel about runts?”

Louis gave him a knowing look.

“Don’t start.”

 

And Papillon laughed.


End file.
